Category Archives: Democratic Party

Justice May Be Blind, But Ethics Needs to See

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Donald Trump’s new campaign team seems to have gotten him focused on a real-world issue that could do Clinton damage — the Clinton Foundation.  “Trump began this week hammering her for the Clinton Foundation, an organization created by her and her husband former President Bill Clinton, which uses private donations to fund aid programs in developing countries.”

I have in the past defended the Clinton Foundation, because it actually has done a lot of good. Unlike some other foundations it doesn’t just hand out grants, but actually implements programs itself to benefit people. And I do not believe the Clintons could get away with using the CF as a slush fund to enrich themselves without getting caught, although I assume they pay themselves from it as much as they are lawfully allowed.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not a problem. Jonathan Chait wrote a few days ago,

“Give a man a reputation as an early riser,” said Mark Twain, “and he can sleep ‘til noon.” Hillary Clinton finds herself in the opposite situation: She has a reputation for venality — the merits of which we can set aside momentarily — that forces her to a higher ethical standard. Her inadequate response to the conflicts of interest inherent in the Clinton Foundation show that she is not meeting that standard, and has not fully grasped the severity of her reputational problem.

The inherent conflict is, of course, that she’s accused of using her position as Secretary of State to sell favors to foreign governments and corporations and friends who donated to the Foundation. And every time some more emails from somewhere trickle out, new accusations blossom in right-wing media.

So far, however, no one has been able to document a direct quid pro quo. But again, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a problem.

According to experts, the emails confirm donors were gaining access to Clinton, yet there is no evidence she granted them special favors, an important distinction that may determine how damaging the controversy is to Clinton’s campaign.

“These emails show that there was a long line of Clinton Foundation friends who had no qualms about asking the Clinton State Department for meetings, favors, and special treatment,” said Scott Amey, general counsel at the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO. “Not shocking, but it is disappointing that there were such blurred lines between State Department officials and outsiders. I see little action on these latest requests, but I think further investigation is needed.”

Bill announced that if Hillary is elected, the Foundation would stop taking donations from foreign governments. What I hadn’t realized was that it stopped taking money from foreign governments in 2009, when Hillary became Secretary of State. But it resumed taking such donations in February 2015, which was just about the time Hillary had locked up the presidential nomination with Democratic Party insiders and money backers.

And, anyway, the foreign governments thing isn’t the only problem. What about corporations like petroleum companies that might want to influence U.S. policy?

Why couldn’t they see that could be a problem? It’s similar to the situation with Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street speeches — why wouldn’t see have seen those might end up biting her? Why was she so determined to not release transcripts? People gripe that Clinton is owned by corporations, and this is why.

She’s gotten away with a lot this year through a combination of dishonest redirection (“Look! a Bernie Bro!”) and the fact that Donald Trump has been running the dumbest presidential campaign in U.S. history.  But when called upon to defend herself from legitimate questions and criticisms, time and time again she’s botched it.

I’ve lost track of the stories she’s given about the State Department emails, when a simple “I had a server set up that was more secure” would have sufficed, and even might have been true. More recently she tried to claim that she set up the private server on the advice of Colin Powell. Then Colin Powell denied this. Oops! On to the next excuse, I guess.

Back to Jonathan Chait:

The Clinton Foundation is hardly a large or unique source of corruption in American politics. It is, however, a source of grubby, low-level access headaches. That is the takeaway from the latest batch of State Department emails. The emails do not show that Clinton Foundation donors received any policy favors from Hillary Clinton or other elected officials. What they show is that people who donated to the foundation believed they were owed favors by Clinton’s staffers, and at least one of those staffers — the odious Doug Band — shared this belief. Band, for instance, called the crown prince of Bahrain, who donated millions to the foundation, a “good friend of ours.” …

…As Ben Wallace-Wells recently observed, the internal culture revealed by the Clinton emails is mostly one of earnest bureaucratic befuddlement, not corruption. The favors amounted to requests for meetings that may or may not have been granted. The foundation’s donors were a class of prospective sugar daddies to be fended off.

At the same time, criminality is not the correct standard to which a public official ought to be held. From the standpoint of both good government and Hillary Clinton’s political image, the correct course of action is to transfer the Clinton Foundation’s work to some other charitable entity with no connection to the prospective First Couple.

Now Bill is saying he will leave the Clinton Foundation if Hillary is elected. That will be necessary, although knowing the Right the Foundation will continue to be a boogeyman the same way they continue to blame ACORN for their election woes, even though ACORN shut down in 2010.

The Whole Foods Party

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Another great column by Andrew O’Hehir. Do read the whole thing.

I have a message for Democrats who look at Trump’s sliding poll numbers, in the wake of the Khan family feud and “Obama is the founder of ISIS” and “let’s try Americans at Gitmo,” and tell themselves that the nightmare is almost over and everything will soon return to normal. You are whistling past the graveyard. Hillary Clinton will very likely win this election, and it could end up as a blowout, although I’d be reluctant to bet the ranch on that. But what kind of “normal” are you so happy about? The paralysis and dysfunction of the entire last decade? To pretend that such an outcome — the candidate who is widely disliked and mistrusted defeating the candidate who is widely feared and despised — does anything at all to address the structural and ideological crisis that is eating away at both parties and the bipartisan system represents an epic level of denial.

You know who you are, oh nice people who feel vaguely wounded right about now! Despite the Bernie Sanders insurrection and the fact that the Democratic Party has been electorally eviscerated between the coasts and has hit a historic low point in terms of voter self-identification, you have somehow convinced yourselves that nothing fundamental has gone wrong and it will all be OK. I mean, yours is the party of good government and rational foreign policy and tolerance and diversity, right? Once you get past this unexpectedly ugly (and unexpectedly disturbing) election and park Hillary in the White House, the future is secure.

Then O’Hehir hints at what Thomas Frank said recently — don’t expect Hillary Clinton and the establishment Dems to live up to their recent progressive campaign promises. He also cited what Lenin said about the contradiction of  “bourgeois democracy” that promises equality but delivers economic injustice. O’Hehir continues,

What we have instead are two political parties in profound crisis. One of them has been compelled, however reluctantly, to confront the fact that its electoral coalition has collapsed and that its downscale white voters and zillionaire corporate funders have entirely different desires and goals. The other one is simultaneously in better shape and worse shape: It has won electoral pluralities in five of the last six presidential elections, which has allowed it to ignore the crisis or pretend it doesn’t exist.

Hillary Clinton and her wing of the Democratic Party represent Lenin’s contradiction, and still deny that it’s a contradiction. They stand for women’s rights and LGBT rights and combating “systemic racism,” and there’s no reason to doubt their sincerity. But as Thomas B. Edsall wrote in the New York Times this week, the Democrats are no longer a “class-based coalition” with an economic agenda, but a loose coalition of “upscale well-educated whites” and African-American and Latino voters in big cities. Some connection is assumed between the culture-war and identity-politics issues at the heart of the party’s current identity and universal economic progress, but its precise nature is unclear and essentially metaphysical. …

I particularly agree with this part:

… the Democrats’ predicament goes beyond the fact that they jettisoned class-based economic populism in favor of a whole package of free-market policies aimed at liberating the global flow of investment capital, and that the carnage of that Bill Clinton-era decision is all around us. As Edsall says, the party is becoming “increasingly dependent on a white upper middle class that has isolated itself from the rest of American society.” That’s what I perceived in Philadelphia: a party with an agreeable multicultural roster, almost pathologically devoted to the proposition that nothing was wrong with America that a little upbeat dialogue couldn’t fix. If Trump voters perceive the Democrats as “the party of the winners,” a cosmopolitan coastal coalition with no cultural, geographical or social connection to working-class America, they have a point.

One of the things that made me crazy about the true-blue Dems recently was that the objected to all those independent voters messing up their primaries and decided the answer to challenges from the Left is to close the primaries. Many sincerely believed a majority of the independents voting for Sanders were just Republican trolls. The party has “isolated itself from the rest of American society,” indeed.

O’Hehir makes a lot more good points; like I said, do read the whole thing.

With the end of the Sanders campaign has come the usual Great Splintering into multitudes of ineffectual fringe groups, because the curse of liberal/progressives is that everyone wants to be a leader. But one group that might actually accomplish something is Brand New Congress. Read an article about BNC here.

One-Dimensional News

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Right now political news stories are all pretty much about the awfulness of Donald Trump. And I’m bored with that. Yeah, he’s awful. There’s no end of how awful he is.

For the sake of defeating the Great Awfulness I’ve been holding back on criticizing Clinton, but there’s not much else to talk about.

Thomas Frank writes that with a Clinton victory a near certainty, you can forget about Clinton leading a progressive administration:

And so ends the great populist uprising of our time, fizzling out pathetically in the mud and the bigotry stirred up by a third-rate would-be caudillo named Donald J Trump. So closes an era of populist outrage that began back in 2008, when the Davos dream of a world run by benevolent bankers first started to crack. The unrest has taken many forms in these eight years – from idealistic to cynical, from Occupy Wall Street to the Tea Party – but they all failed to change much of anything. …

Just a short while ago the American national newspapers were running page-one stories telling readers it was time to take seriously Trump’s followers, if not Trump himself. And on 3 August, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman actually typed the following: “It scares me that people are so fed up with elites, so hate and mistrust [Hillary] Clinton and are so worried about the future – jobs, globalization and terrorism” that they might actually vote for Trump.

Yes, it scared Friedman that the American people didn’t like their masters any longer. As it has no doubt scared many of his rich friends to learn over the past few years that the people formerly known as middle class are angry about losing their standard of living to the same forces that are making those rich people ever more comfortable.

Well, Friedman need be frightened no longer. Today it looks as though his elites are taking matters well in hand. “Jobs” don’t really matter now in this election, nor does the debacle of “globalization”, nor does anything else, really. Thanks to this imbecile Trump, all such issues have been momentarily swept off the table while Americans come together around Clinton, the wife of the man who envisaged the Davos dream in the first place.

Frank thinks that once Clinton gets her landslide victory she will once again throw progressivism under the bus, and I suspect he’s right.

My leftist friends persuaded themselves that this stuff didn’t really matter, that Clinton’s many concessions to Sanders’ supporters were permanent concessions. But with the convention over and the struggle with Sanders behind her, headlines show Clinton triangulating to the right, scooping up the dollars and the endorsement, and the elites shaken loose in the great Republican wreck.

She is reaching out to the foreign policy establishment and the neocons. She is reaching out to Republican office-holders. She is reaching out to Silicon Valley. And, of course, she is reaching out to Wall Street. In her big speech in Michigan on Thursday she cast herself as the candidate who could bring bickering groups together and win policy victories through really comprehensive convenings.

Things will change between now and November, of course. But what seems most plausible from the current standpoint is a landslide for Clinton, and with it the triumph of complacent neoliberal orthodoxy. She will have won her great victory, not as a champion of working people’s concerns, but as the greatest moderate of them all, as the leader of a stately campaign of sanity and national unity. The populist challenge of the past eight years, whether led by Trump or by Sanders, will have been beaten back resoundingly. Centrism will reign triumphant over the Democratic party for years to come. This will be her great accomplishment. The bells will ring all over Washington DC.

I disagree that this will be the end of the great populist uprising, but certainly Clinton’s victory — made possible by The Great Awfulness — has slowed it down a lot.

In the New York Times Thomas Edsall wrote,

If current trends continue, not only will there be a class inversion among the white supporters of the Democratic Party, but the party will become increasingly dependent on a white upper middle class that has isolated itself from the rest of American society.

Instead of serving as the political arm of working and middle class voters seeking to move up the ladder, the Democratic Party faces the prospect of becoming the party of the winners, in collaboration with many of those in the top 20 percent who are determined to protect and secure their economic and social status.

It’s been that for quite a while, seems to me. It’s just been in denial about it.

Neither Edsall nor Frank have much to say about the Sanders insurgency within the Democratic Party. I don’t know whether it will be a factor going forward or not; that remains to be seen. If progressives follow their usual pattern of crawling into holes until the next presidential election, probably not. If they follow through (as many vow to do) by electing progressives to Congress in the next several election cycles, then there’s hope.

Trump: God’s Gift to Hillary Clinton

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Two things happened yesterday regarding our major party presidential candidates. Both were reported by major media outlets. One I’m sure you’ve heard about; the other you probably haven’t.

Here’s the one you may not know about, reported by Eric Lichtblau at the New York Times:

A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.

In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the United States ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor’s interests there.

In another email, the foundation appeared to push aides to Mrs. Clinton to help find a job for a foundation associate. Her aides indicated that the department was working on the request.

There are many examples of apparent collusion between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation, although without evidence of direct quid pro quo Clinton has always been able to brush it off.

The State Department turned the new emails over to a conservative advocacy group, Judicial Watch, as part of a lawsuit that the group brought under the Freedom of Information Act.

The documents included 44 emails that were not among some 55,000 pages of emails that Mrs. Clinton had previously given to the State Department, which she said represented all her “work-related” emails. The document release centers on discussions between Mrs. Clinton’s aides and Clinton Foundation executives about a number of donors and associates with interests before the State Department.

Tom Fitton, the president of Judicial Watch, charged that Mrs. Clinton “hid” the documents from the public because they appeared to contradict her official pledge in 2009 to remove herself from Clinton Foundation business while leading the State Department.

In a normal election year, this would have been headline stuff, and the Republican Noise Machine would be screaming about it to the rafters. However, this happened:

Donald Trump has been accused of a making an “assassination threat” against rival Hillary Clinton, plunging his presidential campaign into a fresh crisis.

The volatile Republican nominee was speaking at a rally in Wilmington, North Carolina, about the next president’s power to appoint supreme court justices. “Hillary wants to abolish, essentially abolish, the second amendment,” said Trump, eliciting boos from the crowd.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the second amendment people, maybe there is, I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, that will be a horrible day.”

You’ve heard about that one, huh? The Republican Noise Machine has been forced to drop the Clinton emails for the moment and instead make excuses for Trump.

There’s a conspiracy theory popular in the dunce corners of social media that says The Donald actually is working for the Clintons. He met with Bill right before he declared his candidacy, see, and the Plan all along was for Trump to win the nomination and then throw the election to Hillary.

Do I believe this? No; I think the simpler explanation is that Trump is (quoting our frequent mahacommenter eryinyes) “bug fuck crazy.” But if I were inclined to believe such things, this would be Exhibit A. Time after time, Trump trips up his own campaign. This time he ran over his own campaign with a bus.

Note that just a few days ago, Trump made one of a series of promises that he would “tone down” his rhetoric. He appears to not know what that means.

See also “Stress Over Family Finances Propelled Hillary Clinton Into Corporate World.”

Resist the Return to Normalcy

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As much fun as it is to ridicule Republicans, I want to take a look at the Democrats today.  Daniel O’Hehir wrote something several days ago, during the Dem convention, that I want to quote —

This year’s DNC, culminating in the triumphant coronation of Hillary Clinton on Thursday night and her highly effective acceptance speech, hecklers and all, was a great victory for normal people. Whether or not that’s a good thing, in a country where the normal has become pathological and the pathological normal, is open for debate.

Normal people were all around me on the walk back to the subway station: Polite, practical-minded people with college degrees and good jobs; people who were well-dressed but not ostentatiously dressed. Most but not all were homeowners, most but not all were moms and dads. Most lived in large-ish cities or middle-sized cities or the kinds of inner suburban towns that have actual bookstores and actual coffee shops. Of course I’m guessing about those demographics, but I’m right. They were “diverse,” in the usual Democratic Party check-the-boxes way, in that quite a few were not white and quite a few were not straight and the ratio of female to male was about even. But there was a certain conformity in effect nonetheless — a conformity of spirit, or of vibe — and if you claim not to know what I’m talking about you’re kidding yourself. They were normal. They were pleasant. They were Democrats.

I suppose there’s nothing wrong with normal, but there’s also clinging to a fiction of normal when reality is not normal. A lot of Democrats are not seeing beyond the November election. To them, as long as Hillary wins, everything will be right as rain. The sun will shine; the bells will ring. For me, trying to relate to “normal” Democrats these days makes me feel like Wednesday Addams.

The two major factions more or less interacting within what we might loosely call Democratic Party politics are partisan party believers (the Girl Scouts) and progressives/lefties who no longer trust the party but who, because Trump, mostly will vote for Hillary Clinton anyway (Wednesday and Pugsley). For the former, nothing matters except electing Hillary Clinton. What we’re going through now is just normal politics.  For the latter, nothing is normal, and the Revolution is just beginning.

Not a factor: Former Bernie supporters who are running off to join the Greens.  Jill Stein is polling at 2 percent today. They’re big on social media but not having an impact on real world politics, apparently.

Conor Lynch wrote that the infighting between Clinton and Sanders supporters will shape the future of the Democratic Party:

In a nutshell, the former are predominately Democratic partisans who subscribe to a binary way of thinking about politics (e.g., Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal), while the latter tend to be progressives who champion principles over party and reject partisan narratives. At the convention, the former rolled their eyes and shook their heads in disgust whenever the latter booed or chanted (nothing irks Democratic partisans quite like rudeness), and were attending for their candidate and their party. The latter, who showed up with pro-Palestinian rights and anti-TPP signs, attended the convention for their candidate, but more importantly, for their movement.

Conor Lynch cited this article by Bruce Shapiro:

Elected officials, even the best and most principled, operate within the parameters of possibility that they discern in their constituency. In that sense, elected officials–and American presidents most of all–are the end of the political digestive system. Electoral politics is usually the last place change gets felt. Even a sympathetic, justice-minded president is only likely to speed reform when backed by a powerful grassroots campaign, as Lyndon Johnson did with the Civil Rights Act and Barack Obama did with marriage equality. …

… Movement politics, on the other hand, is about reshaping and redefining those parameters. Moving the goalposts. It’s not only cynicism that has moved Hillary Rodham Clinton to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and embrace a vice-presidential candidate who is far to the left of the Bill Clinton legacy on most issues. It’s her awareness–too slow to dawn, perhaps, but awareness nonetheless–that after a generation of free-trade bills and Wall Street deregulation and prison expansion, the terms of debate have changed. Thank you, Bernie.

When Bernie Sanders says the revolution continues, this is what he means. His campaign–movement politics in the guise of a primary run–has changed the terms of debate, and done so with more success than many of us who voted for him expected. Look–the previous high-water mark for a socialist in American politics was Eugene V. Debs, winning 1 million votes from jail during World War I. Sanders has won 12 million. That is historic. And the argument Sanders pushed–both within the Democratic Party and beyond it–does not end tonight or on Election Day.

Whether Clinton won’t flipflop back to supporting TPP remains to be seen, and whether Tim Kaine really is to the Left of the Clinton legacy is arguable, but let’s go on …

Those dropping out of the Sanders movement in favor of the Green Party are right about one thing — the two-party system is not serving us well. Neither party is in touch with the real needs of most U.S. citizens any more.  I don’t personally call the primaries “rigged,” but there’s no question Dem Party insiders managed the primaries to favor Clinton’s nomination.

Going back to O’Hehir:

… the Democrats have doubled down on normal. They have defeated or absorbed the defiantly non-normal left-wing opposition, at least for the moment, and driven the renegades out of the tent. Now they are ready to stand together, in nice pants, and save whatever can be saved of the American republic. They have built the last fortress of what Jeb Bush plaintively described last winter as “regular-order democracy,” a Minas Tirith of whole-grain wholesomeness, standing alone against the Dark Lord.

If Hillary Clinton herself has spent too long in the enclaves of power and privilege to qualify as fully normal, she remains normal-ish, a convincing simulacrum of the normal person she used to be. Clinton is not an orator in the Barack Obama class or a master showman like Donald Trump, but her speech on Thursday was well-crafted and well-modulated. She used the gendered perception that she is shrill or harsh or unlikable to her advantage, presenting herself as the unflappable adult administrator — the high school principal, writ large — prepared to make tough decisions while other people yell and lose their minds.

I’m not looking forward to the Clinton Administration. But the high school principal analogy makes me think of Shapiro’s line about elected officials being at the end of the political digestive system. High school principals and elected officials are creatures of The System. They may be good at their jobs, or bad; they may hold positions you like, or not. But they tend to be too close to the system to see how it might be failing, and that’s especially true of those who’ve been in it for a long time.

And Clinton supporters and “normal” Democrats on the whole don’t seem able to see the systemic problems, either, or that the peasants are revolting. Recently Ron Brownstein wrote in the Atlantic that Clinton is having a problem winning Millennials.

… even though roughly three-fourths of all battleground-state Millennials expressed these disparaging views of Trump, the survey found Clinton drawing just 43 percent against him in a four-way race that included libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. While Trump attracted only 24 percent, nearly as many picked Johnson or Stein, and the rest said they were either undecided or wouldn’t vote. By comparison, Obama carried two-thirds of Millennials in 2008 and three-fifths in 2012.

I ran this by some “normal” Democrats of my aquaintance, and it was pooh-poohed. Clinton doesn’t have a problem with Millennials! More of them will be voting for her than for Trump! That’s all they see. And Ross Perot attracted a lot of younger voters in 1992, and Bill Clinton won anyway! Hoorah for us!

You might remember that “Return to Normalcy” was Warren G. Harding’s election slogan in 1920.  Normalcy was fun for some people, for awhile, but didn’t last. What is “normalcy,” anyway?

I still expect Clinton to be elected in November. It’s not going to be a normal four years, if I have anything to say about it.

The Problem With Great Expectations

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So far the Democratic convention has gone much better than I’d feared. I thought the speeches last night were particularly good. If this last day goes smoothly enough Clinton should get a nice bounce in the polls. And I think once more Americans focus on the general election and consider their options, Clinton shouldn’t have that much trouble staying ahead of Trump.

That’s mostly because of Trump. He’s unhinged. He’s in way over his head. The debates are going to be painful and/or a laugh riot, depending on how much you enjoy watching someone embarrass himself. Watch him try to get out of them.

However, I want to talk about expectations and projections. I wrote recently that I hoped there would be a roll call vote at the DNC for the sake of the Sanders supporters, and there was. But then I ran into a conversation in social media among Sanders supporters who were complaining that they didn’t like the way the roll call vote was conducted.

First, they didn’t like that the superdelegate votes were added into the state tallies. But that’s when they are added in, some of us explained. They don’t count until the convention, but now we are at the convention. Now they count. Apparently this was news.

They also didn’t like the cheesy little speeches the spokesperson for each state gave, especially the ones that praised Clinton. Sorry, but that’s the way it’s always done, we said. If you didn’t know that, adjust.

Sometimes, if things don’t turn out the way you expected, you need to honestly admit to yourself that your expectations were wrong. Stomping around being mad isn’t going to change anything.

A bigger howler is by Amanda Marcotte at Salon. Amanda thought President Obama’s speech last night was “meh.” I watched the speech and thought it very good. Maybe a little too long, maybe not the absolute best he ever gave, but on the whole I thought he did a good job reminding Democrats why they are Democrats, knocking Trump, and praising Hillary Clinton. But Marcotte didn’t like it.

It’s hard to put a thesis statement into Barack Obama’s speech. He roamed around, hat-tipping Black Lives Matter and Clinton’s hard work, but one never got the sense, from him, of Clinton as a friend. Michelle Obama sold Clinton that way, portraying her as an older woman she had grown close to and come to admire. Bill Clinton had done it, portraying his wife as she frankly, as a human, deserves to be seen: As a kind-hearted woman who loves her child and can set human male hearts a-flutter. …

… Most of us wanted to hear the real story of how these two former foes became friends. Obama could have told that story in style, and made history while he did it. His failure to do so is on him.

First, who says they are friends? I’ve never gotten the sense that Obama and Clinton were friends. They appear to have had a good working relationship and mutual respect and all that, although for all we know they can’t stand each other and just put on a good act in public. But in this case, Marcotte was upset because Clinton was insufficiently praised, somehow, even though I felt Obama did quite a good job of selling Clinton as the best possible candidate for POTUS. Not that I bought it, but it was a good pitch. But the speech didn’t meet Marcotte’s expectations, so she felt let down.

Many of the Sanders die-hards who were certain he was going to be awarded the nomination at the convention are now certain that the REVOLUTION (these people do love the caps lock button) will happen in November when Jill Stein of the Green Party either wins or takes a lot of states or otherwise screws with the status quo.

Stein is currently polling at 3 percent, which is down from 4.8 percent at the end of June, according to Real Clear Politics.

The tendency to see your side as absolutely pure and blameless and the other side as evil incarnate is on full display. There actually is a strong circumstantial case that Vladimir Putin is connected to Trump and the timing of the Wikileaks email releases. I have no doubt that the Clinton team is working overtime right now to dig up more evidence, and they will find it if it’s out there. But many once-Sanders-now-Stein people are dismissing the Putin allegations as so much propaganda.

And while I’m more or less reconciled to Clinton being the next POTUS, the DNC still needs a thorough shaking out. The Wikileaks emails give us plenty of evidence that the Clinton campaign and the DNC were unfairly working together to kill the Sanders candidacy. They’ve got to be held accountable for this so that it doesn’t happen again. However, the purge is going to have to wait until after the general election.

Going back to President Obama’s speech last night, I liked Andrew O’Hehir’s comment:

His long speech wove its way through and around the central issue of this convention: the unpredictable infusion of new activist energy brought by the Bernie Sanders campaign, and the question of whether that is an asset or a liability when it comes to defeating Donald Trump. I remain amazed, and quite frankly insulted, that so many Democrats seem determined to crush internal dissent and insist on a happy-talk spectacle of enforced conformity. What party do they think they belong to, and what do they know about its history? It’s an insult to the collective intelligence of the broader left-liberal tradition in this country, delivered by well-meaning people who claim to be its defenders and ought to know better.

A lot of the young folks who have just been introduced to presidential politics by working for Bernie Sanders are now thoroughly disgusted with the Democratic Party and want nothing to do with it. But I think the Dems are salvageable once we can pry it out of the hands of the Clintons and their neoliberal cohorts. That’s going to be awhile, unfortunately.

Messy Choices

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Last night at the convention went better than I had feared. At least, little of the rancor was noticeable on the teevee.

Later today will come the roll call vote to nominate Clinton. Maybe. CNN reports,

The Sanders campaign is asking the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign to allow the Vermont senator to help deliver the formal nomination — a symbolic gesture that would allow the majority of Sanders’ delegates to be tallied in the convention while also showing that Sanders is behind Clinton.
Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs said Tuesday that all sides have agreed to let Vermont offer up Clinton’s nomination by unanimous consent but he would not say whether Sanders would be the superdelegate to propose her nomination.

If “unanimous consent” means they’d skip the roll call, IMO that would be a huge mistake. The die-hards still think the vote might magically favor Sanders. The votes need to be public, or else they’re going to forever suspect they were cheated of a victory. And that would be true even if Sanders makes the nomination.

Vice President Joe Biden, who was doing a walkthrough of the Wells Fargo Arena Tuesday morning, said that Democrats need to “show a little class” to Sanders supporters who are still stinging from his loss.
“We have to show a little class and let them be frustrated for a while,” Biden told CNN. “It’s OK.”
I so wish Biden had run. I think he’d be the nominee now, and most people would be okay with that.
We have a seriously difficult thing ahead of us, and I don’t mean just keeping Donald Trump out of the White House. Elect Hillary Clinton, yes, as she’s pretty much what we’re stuck with. But the DNC still needs a thorough flushing out, and having her in the White House is going to make that more difficult. I don’t see how that can be done without hurting her administration, frankly, but that’s how it’s got to be.

Not a Good Start

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation as chair of the DNC yesterday, although it’s not clear to me if the resignation took effect immediately or after the convention. In any event, the news this morning is that she tried to address the Florida delegation and was robustly booed. That she is still being allowed anywhere near a microphone at a Democratic Party event indicates the DNC is still out to lunch.

By now you’ve probably heard that Wikileaks published a ton of hacked DNC emails. This revealed that DNC staffers on the whole were the kewl kids from high school who were snots to everybody else. They were snots about Sanders and his supporters (examples) and clearly had their thumbs on the scale for Clinton. But they were also bratty about some Clinton donors who weren’t kewl enough, or something.

In a May 16 exchange about where to seat a top Florida donor, Kaplan declared that “he doesn’t sit next to POTUS!” — referring to Obama.

“Bittel will be sitting in the sh—iest corner I can find,” responded Shapiro. She also referred to other donors as “clowns.”

It is now manifestly clear that DNC staff were derisive of Sanders and sought to undermine his campaign.

Several messages show how the DNC, which is supposed to be neutral during the Democratic primary, undermined Bernie Sanders’ campaign while supporting Hillary Clinton’s.

In one email, the DNC acknowledges, “Super PAC paying young voters to push back online on Sanders supporters.”

Another details how DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz furiously pressured MSNBC after it criticized her “unfair” treatment of Sanders.

Several other messages show how the DNC worked with journalists in a way that favored Clinton.

[etc.]

Any chance of “unity” at the Dem convention is close to gone.

If Democrats expect the Republican Convention clown show last week to automatically make the DNC look like a smooth, unifying parade—they better look out the window real soon.

What they’ll likely see is a sea of protesting progressives who stood behind Bernie Sanders throughout the primary and are now standing against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment.

Why wouldn’t they in the aftermath of the recent WikiLeaks dump of nearly 20,000 DNC emails—which show the supposedly neutral arm of the party campaigning to discredit and mock Bernie Sanders; a fact that Sanders and his legion of supporters have been railing about for months, only to be knocked down as “conspiracy theorists.”

To save face, the Democrats forced Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as party chairwoman. But unfortunately for the establishment, the gasoline has already been poured onto the ever-growing fire of revolt against the Democratic Party—and there’s no sign of those flames dwindling.

Shockingly, their tone deafness struck again as Clinton decided to name Wasserman Schultz as an “honorary chair” of her campaign.

Throughout the primaries, several times on this blog (example), I commented that if Clinton wanted a “unifying” convention she and her supporters had damn well better change her tone toward Sanders and his supporters. That didn’t happen.  If the Dem convention is a mess, that’s on the DNC and the Clinton campaign.

Bernie Sanders is doing his best to calm things down, but when he told his delegates that it was imperative to support Hillary Clinton to defeat Donald Trump, they booed him.

I’m not happy about the leaking of the emails, however. Wikileaks is not operating in good faith. People are accusing Wikileaks of being a front for Vladimir Putin, who is said to prefer Trump. And given the timing of the leaks, I can’t say that’s a bad guess.

I have more to say on this, but am short of blogging time. Maybe later.

The Sort of Endorsement

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So today was the big endorsement of Hillary Clinton by Bernie Sanders. Philip Bump points out that his endorsement speech today was very similar to a non-endorsement speech of a month ago. The difference is that he  has been able to push Hillary Clinton to the left on some issues, at least as far as the platform is concerned. Bump concludes,

Sanders’s speech in June bit harder, using words such as “disgrace,” “combat,” “pain” and “starvation.” His comments endorsing Clinton were softer: “transforming,” “fix” and “struggling.”

You can also see where the Democratic platform ended up, based on what Sanders left out. The tuition relief was for public colleges, not all college students. The call for fixing the environment dropped a mention of a tax on carbon (and a ban on fracking, which Sanders also mentioned in June).

This was entirely the point, of course. The goal was for Sanders to make the case to his supporters that Clinton would be a champion for their issues, too — if not all of the issues and if not in the same way. He mirrored what he said a month ago because he was asked to send a message to his team that the revolution would go on, albeit with a new leader.

Except she’ll never be the “leader” to most Sanders supporters. Maybe they’ll vote for her, but they see her more as an obstacle to be manipulated than as a “leader.” I doubt very much she’s going to accomplish anything that the progressive Left wants, even if she tries. Which is another “if.”

William Greider writes,

In this season of political chaos, the party led by Hillary Clinton is holding on to the familiar past it knows—the glory days when New Democrats were the brilliant winners.

Confused and alarmed by the current Republican breakup, the Clinton machine has responded with crab-like caution, maybe hoping to have it both ways. Clinton-Obama veterans agreed early on that 2016 would be Hillary’s turn. She would bring her own assets and could run on her husband’s reputation as the popular, pragmatic centrist. Events did not cooperate. In this season of change, HRC’s new agenda sounds a lot like the same old, same old.

After a review of Bill Clinton’s record as POTUS, which could be seen as a betrayal of blue collar workers and unions, Greider continues,

In political terms, organized labor lost big. It was permanently displaced by Wall Street finance as the most influential constituency of the Clinton-Obama presidencies. The working class has not forgotten this brutal betrayal (pundits scold the losers, urging them to get over it). In fact, desperate working familes are still getting hammered by the ugly consequences.

Millions of high-wage manufacturing jobs were destroyed by cheap labor competition, just as the major corporations had intended. Did Bill Clinton know what he was doing? He’s a shrewd guy, and it’s impossible to believe he was unaware of the domestic destruction he was authorizing. Did Hillary Clinton know? Her silence on the subject is not reassuring.

Political reporters and op-ed economists in the prestigious newspapers continue to dismiss angry workers as deluded or just plain stupid. The tortured denials of what ordinary people know to be true in their own lives drip with class condescension, talking down to people with economic abstractions when their human losses are about real pain. These establishment commentaries typically have two omissions: The reporters seldom talk with the people actually victimized, and the opinion pieces almost never mention what happened to wages.

I still say that the only people who are genuinely enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton are upper-income white people over 50. Others may vote for her, but all the rah-rah is coming from people privileged enough not to notice.

After detailing a lot of ways the Democratic Party continues to sell out working people and blue collar jobs, Greider writes,

I recite these facts to demonstrate how distant the Democratic Party establishment has drifted from the everyday realities of working stiffs. Dem strategists and Clinton advisers, who were cheering progress, didn’t see jobs as an explosive issue for Election 2016. The official unemployment rate was grossly misleading, but it was good fodder or the campaign. The Clinton betrayal was forgotten long ago. Wrong again.

The events of 2016 derailed such optimistic expectations. HRC’s advantage succeeded in scaring off potential competitors for the nomination—all but Vermont socialist Bernie Sanders. Not to worry; the Clinton machine would brush him aside. But Bernie’s eye was on something much bigger than winning the White House (always unlikely for him). Senator Sanders aspired to encourage a “political revolution” that would restore democracy for the people and, not coincidentally, liberate the money-bound Democratic Party from its patrons. Clintonistas never seemed to understand that Bernie meant it. He still does. His clarity and conviction stole the show from HRC.

They still don’t think he means it, btw.

HRC’s dilemma looks like this: To vigorously confront the angry zeitgeist of 2016, the new party of Hillary Clinton would have to turn on the old party of Bill Clinton. To seek ownership of this year’s fed-up rebellion, HRC would have to speak for the anger instead of smothering it with platitudes. She would also need to acknowledge (gently) that vast destruction flowed from her husband’s presidency, but that things are different now.

I don’t think she’s got it in her to do that.

Don’t hold your breath. To execute such a hard-nosed leap, the Clinton machine would have to do a back flip that abandons not just Mr. Bill but also the Wall Street power brokers whom she trusts. Given HRC’s natural caution, it doesn’t seem likely she could ever make that break, especially since she’s still surrounded by Clinton veterans who are dreaming of a blowout election victory in November.

What was going to be Hillary’s best asset has turned into an awkward millstone. People will still ask what she really thinks about the family legacy. The GOP will demand an answer. Hillary’s avoidance doesn’t cut it. If Americans wind up choosing Donald Trump as their president, the faint-hearted Democratic Party will have to share the blame.

Back to the enthusiasm thing. Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR reports that Clinton has a huge enthusiasm gap among young people.

There’s a little good news for Clinton in the poll of 18- to 30-year-olds — in a matchup against Donald Trump, she clearly bests the New York businessman, 38 to 17 percent. But that leaves 45 percent of those young adults who said they were either undecided, wouldn’t vote or would vote for someone else (22 percent).

Another stat that bodes poorly for Clinton: Those who chose her aren’t exactly crazy about her — many instead simply dislike Trump. Those who chose Clinton are about evenly split: 47 percent said they “mainly support” her, while 53 percent said they “mainly oppose” Trump.

Young people may not be much of a factor in November, if large numbers of them remain ambivalent enough to stay home. But that doesn’t speak well for the future of the Democratic Party, either. And I don’t think the “endorsement” from Sanders is going to change that.  The only thing Hillary Clinton has going for her in this election is Donald Trump.

Judging by social media, the Dem party base has its share of older, complacent voters who assume that as long as Hillary Clinton wins in November, everything will be just fine. I don’t know what it would take for them to haul their heads out of their asses. But the true-blue Clintonista lives in a state of denial.